never can count on a woman keeping cool when the unexpected happens," he
said.

We offered to haul him over. "It's only a matter of holding on and
keeping cool," we said; but he preferred to swim.

"It's a pity you didn't think of telegraphing this performance," I
shouted across the floods; but, in his relief, Mac was equal to the
occasion.

"I'm glad I didn't," he shouted back gallantly, with a sweeping flourish
of his hat; "it might have blocked you coming." The bushman was learning
a new accomplishment.

As his clothes were to come across on the wire, I was given a hint to
"make myself scarce"; so retired over the bank, and helped Jackeroo with
the dinner camp--an arrangement that exactly suited his ideas of the
eternal fitness of things.

During the morning he had expressed great disapproval that a woman should
be idle, while men dragged heavy weights about. "White fellow,
big-fellow-fool all right," he said contemptuously, when Mac explained
that it was generally so in the white man's country. A Briton of the
Billingsgate type would have appealed to Jackeroo as a man of sound
common sense.

By the time the men-folk appeared, he had decided that with a little
management I would be quite an ornament to society. "Missus bin help ME
all right," he told the Sanguine Scot, with comical self-satisfaction.